Not Sure How to Approach Social Media? CARE about Your Readers via Jane Friedman: “Among all the rules you’ll find online—the 80/20 rule (only 20 percent of your posts should be about your books or blog posts), the admonitions against using social media as a bullhorn, the warnings about over-automating—there’s also an unspoken tenet. This tenet isn’t a rule that comes up on the blogosphere. Instead, it’s more of a system of approach; to describe it, I use an acronym that I created while preparing for the San Francisco Writers Conference last February.”

[clickToTweet tweet=”78 percent of Americans have a social media profile via @CaballoFrances” quote=”Fact: 78 percent of Americans have a social media profile “]

Indie Author Updates

Pinning Away Pinterest Social Media by Ronel Janse Van Vuuren: “I had this nagging suspicion that my social media skills are a bit lacking. So I signed up for an email course through social media strategist Frances Caballo’s blog while I was there reading yet another great article. I knew that I was wasting valuable writing-time managing my social media platform. Yet I didn’t know how to fix it on my own. (Yeah, misspelling the title of this blogpost could’ve worked well here…)”

How Will an Author Platform Make You a More Successful Author? by Rachel Thompson: “Every day I hear prickly, sometimes even angry authors, discussing the evils of book marketing: ‘Blogging is a waste of time. I could be writing.’ ‘Social media doesn’t result in sales, so forget it. Not worth it.’ ‘Author platform is just a dumb term some bean dip in a suit made up. Next year they’ll call it something else.’ Oh, dear. Let’s deconstruct.”

Indie Authors: How to Harvest the Epic Marketing Power of Facebook by Penny Sansevieri: “Do you know how much time people are spending on Facebook each day? 50 minutes, according to a recent New York Times article. 50 minutes! Instagram and the Facebook Messenger app are included in that timeframe, but you can bet that the lion’s share is still spent on Facebook itself. It’s more critical than ever to make your Facebook Page work for you by pulling in sales as well as likes.”

5 Important Facebook Metrics and How to Improve Them by Stacey Marone and from Convince and Convert: “You have now seen the light and brought your business to social media platforms. You have a well-populated Facebook fan page, a Twitter account, and a great Pinterest board. You have taken all the lessons to heart about maintaining these social networks by keeping them updated, responding to all comments and inquiries promptly, and following followers.”

What if you no longer had to worry that social media marketing would take hours, leaving you with less time to focus on your writing?

Social Media in 30 Minutes a Day provides a formula that authors can follow to help them save time online without losing their effectiveness or impact.

Now, for the book itself: the tips get better and better as the book progresses. Just the big list of apps that you can use to schedule posts is worth the price of the book! And one of the best points made at the very beginning of the book is that nobody needs to be on every social media platform, and that it’s worth the time to find out where your target audience does their socializing to decide what platforms you should try establishing yourself on. Amazon Customer